A unified distributed ELM framework with supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised big data learning

Extreme learning machine (ELM) as well as its variants have been widely used in many fields for its good generalization performance and fast learning speed. Though distributed ELM can sufficiently process large-scale labeled training data, the current technology is not able to process partial labeled or unlabeled training data. Therefore, we propose a new unified distributed ELM with supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning based on MapReduce framework, called U-DELM. The U-DELM method can be used to overcome the existing distributed ELM framework’s lack of ability to process partially labeled and unlabeled training data. We first compare the computation formulas of supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning methods and found that the majority of expensive computations are decomposable. Next, MapReduce framework based U-DELM is proposed, which extracts three different matrices continued multiplications from the three computational formulas introduced above. After that, we transform the cumulative sums respectively to make them suitable for MapReduce. Then, the combination of the three computational formulas are used to solve the output weight in three different learning methods. Finally, by using benchmark and synthetic datasets, we are able to test and verify the efficiency and effectiveness of U-DELM on learning massive data. Results prove that U-DELM can achieve unified distribution on supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised learning.